crontab programming. bug?

[Tobias Ulbricht <up5a@stud.uni-karlsruhe.de>]

please cc. to me up5a@stud.uni-karlsruhe.de

Hi.

I had the stupid idea to set
EDITOR=my-prog
and execute
crontab -e
to be able to "edit" crontabs in the right way, i.e. without touching the
crontab-files directly but with my own "editor" (here a
cron-gui-interface)

1. this doesn't work, since my c-program returns too quickly or too slow,
anyway crontab *seldomly* "installs" the new file, mostly says it "didn't
change".

2. I tried it with "vi" as editor and if I was fast enough to enter ":wq",
crontab doesn't install it.
(ok. i didn't change a thing but the file was written, accessed, whatever
and crontab should be installed. if you do it slowly, crontab installs
it.)
root@abh-304:/home# crontab -e
crontab: installing new crontab
root@abh-304:/home# crontab -e
crontab: no changes made to crontab

second time I was fast enough typing ":wq"

3. Anyway: any recommendations how to modify crontab from a c-program
without messing with crontabs/user files?
I know gcrontab accesses them directly. but I thought this shouldn't be
dnoe.

thanks for any help.
cheers, tobias.


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